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By Root 1314 0

was noteworthy about these stories was the intelligence of the people giving them. With apparent honesty, these voices described in detail how they’d lost the will to live, how they’d become ill, bedridden, abandoned by friends and family until suddenly a “New Thought” had occurred to them, the thought of their true place in the universe, at which point all their suffering had ended. Along with these testimonies, James analyzed the religious experience of famous men and women, Walt Whitman, John Bunyan, Leo Tolstoy, Saint Teresa, George Fox, John Wesley, and even Kant. There was no evident proselytizing motive. But the effect, for Mitchell, was to make him aware of the centrality of religion in human history and, more important, of the fact that religious feeling didn’t arise from going to church or reading the Bible but from the most private interior experiences, either of great joy or of staggering pain.

Mitchell kept coming back to a paragraph about the neurotic temperament he’d underlined that seemed to describe his own personality and, at the same time, to make him feel better about it. It went:

Few of us are not in some way infirm, or even diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly. In [this] temperament we have the emotionality which is the sine qua non of moral perception; we have the intensity and the tendency to emphasis which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism which carry one’s interests beyond the surface of the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to corners of the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking Heaven that it hasn’t a single morbid fiber in its composition, would be sure to hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors?

If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity.

The first religious studies class Mitchell had taken (the one Bankhead had been in) was a trendy survey course on Eastern religion. Next he enrolled in a seminar on Islam. From there Mitchell graduated to stronger stuff—a course on Thomistic ethics, a seminar on German Pietism—before moving on, in his last semester, to a course called Religion and Alienation in 20th Century Culture. At the first class meeting, the professor, a severe-looking man named Hermann Richter, surveyed with suspicion the forty or so students packed into the classroom. Lifting his chin, he warned in a stern tone, “This is a rigorous, comprehensive, analytical course in twentieth-century religious thought. Any of you who think a little something in alienation might do should think otherwise.”

Glowering, Richter handed out the syllabus. It included Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings, Tillich’s The Courage to Be, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and The Drama of Atheist Humanism by Henri de Lubac. Around the room, students’ faces fell. People had been hoping for The Stranger, which they’d already read in high school. At the next class meeting, fewer than fifteen kids remained.

Mitchell had never had a professor like Richter before. Richter dressed like a banker. He wore gray chalk-striped suits, conservative ties, button-down shirts, and polished brogues. He had the reassuring attributes of Mitchell’s own father—the diligence, the sobriety, the masculinity—while leading a life of unfatherly intellectual cultivation. Every morning Richter had the Frankfurter Allgemeine delivered to his department mailbox. He could quote, in the French, the Vérendrye brothers’ reaction upon seeing the Dakota badlands. He seemed worldlier than most professors and less ideologically programmed. His voice was low, Kissingerian, minus the accent. It was impossible to imagine him as a boy.

Twice a week they met with Richter and